October 26: In which I borrow snark

What this blog needs are some more goddamn charts.

Ben Franklin and his huge ego return after an absence of six months. I confess to be rather charmed by people who acknowledge their own huge egos -- it's what makes me well fitted for show business. And Franklin is never more disarming, and his ego never huger, than when he shows you how he conceals it:

I continu’d...the habit of expressing myself in terms of modest diffidence; never using, when I advanced any thing that may possibly be disputed, the words certainly, undoubtedly, or any others that give the air of positiveness to an opinion; but rather say, I conceive or apprehend a thing to be so and so; it appears to me, or I should think it so or so, for such and such reasons; or I imagine it to be so; or it is so, if I am not mistaken. This habit, I believe, has been of great advantage to me when I have had occasion to inculcate my opinions, and persuade men into measures that I have been from time to time engag’d in promoting.

Then he goes on to show Alexander Pope how he could have written his verse better, ending that particular passage with "This, however, I should submit to better judgments." Ending a passage on modesty by modestly submitting an immodest rewriting of a famous author -- I find that a little showy, like Rickey Henderson's old "snatch" catch; but when you're Rickey, or Ben, different rules apply.

This is also the passage where he shows us how he would get up early and rework essays from "The Spectator" to practice writing good. While reading it, I realized I never did anything like that, nor will I, and for a moment my prized equanimity that I retain concerning the reality that this is as good a writer as I'm ever going to be was upset. But then I remembered I had another writer of genius on my side, and I can't believe I haven't quoted him in the other two Franklin entries. Ben, say hello to my little friend:

He was always proud of telling how he entered Philadelphia, for the first time, with nothing in the world but two shillings in his pocket and four rolls of bread under his arm. But really, when you come to examine it critically, it was nothing. Anybody could have done it....

Benjamin Franklin did a great many notable things for his country, and made her young name to be honored in many lands as the mother of such a son. It is not the idea of this memoir to ignore that or cover it up. ...I merely desired to do away with somewhat of the prevalent calamitous idea among heads of families that Franklin acquired his great genius by working for nothing, studying by moonlight, and getting up in the night instead of waiting til morning like a Christian, and that this programme, rigidly inflicted, will make a Franklin of every father's fool. It is time these gentlemen were finding out that these execrable eccentricities of instinct and conduct are only the evidences of genius, not the creators of it. I wish I had been the father of my parents long enough to make them comprehend this truth, and thus prepare them to let their son have an easier time of it. When I was a child I had to boil soap, notwithstanding my father was wealthy, and I had to get up early and study geometry at breakfast, and peddle my own poetry, and do everything just as Franklin did, in the solemn hope that I would be a Franklin some day. And here I am.

Photo by flickr user Mr. Willeeumm used with a Creative Commons license.

October 7: A hardcore dude and 18th-century offsets

Different offset. Unless it's powered by wave energy, of course!

John Woolman is as hardcore as a Quaker can be. (We saw him earlier in the year opposing dyed clothing. Here, in this passage, he wants to go to Barbados to preach against the slave trade -- but he's worried because the only way to get there is by a ship engaged in the slave trade. So he tells the owner:

If the trade to the West Indies were no more than was consistent with pure wisdom, I believe the passage-money would for good reasons be higher than it is now; and therefore, under deep exercise of mind, I have believed that I should not take advantage of this great trade and small passage-money, but, as a testimony in favor of less trading, should pay more than is common for others to pay if I go at this time.

In other words, he buys an offset to make himself feel better. And the great part is that it just means more money for the very people whose profits, he feels, are immoral. But what is that compared to an easy conscience? He's also a good boycotter:

The oppression of the slaves which I have seen in several journeys southward on this continent, and the report of their treatment in the West Indies, have deeply affected me, and a care to live in the spirit of peace and minister no just cause of offence to my fellow-creatures having from time to time livingly revived in my mind, I have for some years past declined to gratify my palate with those sugars.

(No lie, though: sugar production is still a bitch.) Also note the "livingly," which I love. It sounds religious. You know who else is old-fashioned, though, is God: "In the course of a few weeks it pleased the Lord to visit me with a pleurisy." The Lord doesn't work as much in pleurisy as he used to, preferring motorcycle crashes and domestic disputes in houses with firearms. So it's nice to see Him here in a more classic mode.

Meeting Woolman has been one of the pleasures of this project, and he embodies a paradox that's always fascinated me (maybe it's not really a paradox, though; maybe it's more like a "thing") -- which is that, he seems obviously to have been made crazy by religion, and yet, without religious crazies like this, we'd probably all just be keeping our head down and deploring slavery while shaking down our sugar packets.

I'm still holding on to my dyed clothing, though, particularly the T-shirts that are meant to be vaguely amusing and/or ironic. That's like wearing progress right there.

September 1: Be It Resolved

WHEREAS, the William Penn reading for today has previously done been read;

and it is a national holiday celebrating the glorious heritage of labor, in which I get to be included because I went on strike this year, even though, unlike miners, say, I got cupcakes from Reese Witherspoon's assistant;

and, additionally, I have various and sundry things to do today;

that among these things are going to the Rose Bowl to see a man about a clock-cleaning (I am actually related by marriages to both Tennessee and UCLA but choose UT, wisely I think);

therefore I'm not writing anything new today (Note: I don't like the old Penn post, but here's a post about the Quakers I still kind of like.)

I feel bad, though. To make it up to you, here's Roy Clark doing "Rocky Top" Brady Bunch-style, plus Muppets:


UPDATE (9/2) -- Was my face red (or orange)! Plus I owe my UCLA kin some country ham.

June 8: America's first fair-trader

Quakers like Woolman knew that you don't need a thermometer to know which way the wind blows. Wait.. No, that's right -- you don't need one.

Maybe you think you're pretty righteous. Maybe you don't wear clothes from Old Navy made from Chinese sweatship prison labor; instead, you wear clothes from Banana Republic made from Chinese country-club prison labor. Maybe you shun produce grown by organic farmers, if those farmers used to be investment bankers. Maybe you, and/or the rear bumper of your car, are unafraid to express your outre political positions.

Well, John Woolman (1720-1772) calls bullshit on your whited sepulcher, because you wear dyed clothing:

Through giving way to hiding dirt in our garments a spirit which would conceal that which is disagreeable is strengthened. Real cleanliness becometh a holy people; but hiding that which is not clean by coloring our garments seems contrary to the sweetness of sincerity... And if the value of dye-stuffs, and expense of dyeing, and the damage done to cloth, were all added together, and that cost applied to keeping all sweet and clean, how much more would real cleanliness prevail.

(I know, I know, how can the sepulcher be whited if it's also dyed? With God all things are possible, even mixed metaphors.)

John Woolman, according to both his HC introduction and his Wikipedia entry, was one of the first Americans to notice something hinky about the whole slavery deal, and then devoted much of his life to trying to get at least the Quakers to agree with him. But, as the clothes-dyeing episode suggests, this was just part of his overall concern with social justice:

Industrious women who spin in the factories get some fourpence, some fivepence, and so on to six, seven, eight, nine, or ten pence per day, and find their own house-room and diet. Great numbers of poor people live chiefly on bread and water in the southern parts of England, as well as in the northern parts; and there are many poor children not even taught to read. May those who have abundance lay these things to heart!

Post-boys pursue their business, each one to his stage, all night through the winter. Some boys who ride long stages suffer greatly in winter nights, and at several places I have heard of their being frozen to death. So great is the hurry in the spirit of this world, that in aiming to do business quickly and to gain wealth the creation at this day doth loudly groan.

Well, fortunately we seem to have everything squared away in re: the creation. It's not groaning any more. (Instead, it's turned to revenge.) We will always need Woolmans, even though you can see that a concern for social justice goes hand-in-hand with being a titantic pain in the ass:

I have several times been entertained at the houses of Friends, who had sundry things about them that had the appearance of outward greatness, and as I have kept inward, way hath opened for conversation with such in private, in which Divine goodness hath favored us together with heart-tendering times.

In other words, after you feed him, he complains about your dyed clothes, and your silver, which he is also against, because of the oppressive conditions in the mines. He's a hippie, straight up.

I remember thinking a few years ago that it would become hip to be a Mason, and, since the prediction is coming to pass (I don't think it is really -- if it's in the LA Times the opposite is likely true), I will now go out on a limb and predict that the Quakers will have a renaissance. In some ways it's the perfect liberal religion -- you're supposed to talk as much you want at Meeting.

But good on the Harvard Classics for including this early crusader among its works, although you might also say that that's just symptomatic of the New England sense of moral superiority that made John Kerry the most beloved figure on our national scene.

Apr 17: What if Franklin had gotten an STD?

Franklin today, and I'll begin with a period-appropriate digression: I gave up on HBO's "John Adams." I had them all on my Tivo and watched two of them. Their gelid pacing, the reverence. You have Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney and instead of taking advantage of these actors' splendid ability to go fast, you have them look into the middle distance meaningfully, as if to see the Stop & Shop that's going to be there in the future, or perhaps they're wondering whatever happened to Tom Hanks, who used to be so funny.

Anyway, it's an extremely interesting excerpt because it begins near the place where he stopped writing it before the war (I had forgotten that -- there's a huge gap in the composition of this book). Right off the bat we get Randy Ben:

In the mean time, that hard-to-be-governed passion of youth hurried me frequently into intrigues with low women that fell in my way, which were attended with some expense and great inconvenience, besides a continual risque to my health by a distemper which of all things I dreaded, though by great good luck I escaped it.

He had good luck with the ladies, which is even more impressive when you consider that he had to be "early to bed". (Can you imagine how the course of history would have changed if Franklin had caught a low-women-related "distemper"? Perhaps he never would have invented the Franklin Stove or the 360 dunk!)

Anyway, he starts setting up a library, and then the manuscript ends. But the transition to the later-written stuff is not seamless, instead we get pages and pages of two letters telling Franklin how great he is and how he must continue autobiographing for the good of Humanity:

Life is uncertain, as the preacher tells us; and what will the world say if kind, humane, and benevolent Ben. Franklin should leave his friends and the world deprived of so pleasing and profitable a work; a work which would be useful and entertaining not only to a few, but to millions?

It reminds me of Twain's famous essay about Franklin: "He was always proud of telling how he entered Philadelphia, for the first time, with nothing in the world but two shillings in his pocket and four rolls of bread under his arm. But really, when you come to examine it critically, it was nothing. Anybody could have done it."

One of the things I find charming in Franklin is his huge ego, as seen in publishing the genuflecting letters noted above. Because he knows how to be charming about his vanity:

...I therefore put myself as much as I could out of sight, and stated it as a scheme of a number of friends, who had requested me to go about and propose it to such as they thought lovers of reading. In this way my affair went on more smoothly, and I ever after practis’d it on such occasions; and, from my frequent successes, can heartily recommend it. The present little sacrifice of your vanity will afterwards be amply repaid.

In other words, "I don't present myself as so great, and that's one of the things that's so great about me."

Mar 4: Quaker Self-help

How did William Penn get to be so famous and successful? First of all, it helps to have a father who's a prominent admiral. That doesn't come up in his Fruits of Solitude, his own book of maxim-style wisdom. Note -- not Maxim:

O how sordid is Man grown! Man, the noblest Creature in the World, as a God on Earth, and the Image of him that made it; thus to mistake Earth for Heaven, and worship Gold for God!

This kind of thing never goes out of style -- here's what you'd do, if you were smart:

The World is certainly a great and stately Volume of natural Things; and may be not improperly styled the Hieroglyphicks of a better: But, alas! how very few Leaves of it do we seriously turn over! This ought to be the Subject of the Education of our Youth, who, at Twenty, when they should be fit for Business, know little or nothing of it.

Get thee a Book of Maxims, Capitalize some Nouns, and you will shortly find your way to true Happiness. Not that I'm disagreeing:

Were the Superfluities of a Nation valued, and made a perpetual Tax or Benevolence, there would be more Alms-houses than Poor; Schools than Scholars; and enough to spare for Government besides.

or

5. The first Thing obvious to Children is what is sensible; and that we make no Part of their rudiments.
6. We press their Memory too soon, and puzzle, strain, and load them with Words and Rules; to know Grammer and Rhetorick, and a strange Tongue or two, that it is ten to one may never be useful to them; Leaving their natural Genius to Mechanical and Physical, or natural Knowledge uncultivated and neglected; which would be of exceeding Use and Pleasure to them through the whole Course of their Life.
7. To be sure, Languages are not to be despised or neglected. But Things are still to be preferred.
8. Children had rather be making of Tools and Instruments of Play; Shaping, Drawing, Framing, and Building, &c. than getting some Rules of Propriety of Speech by Heart: And those also would follow with more Judgment, and less Trouble and Time.

Or

They have a Right to censure, that have a Heart to help: The rest is Cruelty, not Justice.

Still, who'd have paid attention to him if he'd just lived in Pennsylvania, instead of founding it?

Jan 17: Franklin's Family Tree

Franklin again? There are 49 volumes in the Harvard Classics. There have been 16 days in the year. We haven’t even touched Vol. 39, “Famous Prefaces”! (Which has a big water stain on the cover.) Yes, it’s Franklin’s birthday, but this smacks of the extremely un-Franklin vice of indolence.

“Good middle-class people, Franklin boasts, were his ancestors,” says the description…hey, that’s just like me, the guy building his Harvard Classics library by mail order! (I might also note that, if memory serves, they were the kind of good middle class people Franklin couldn’t wait to get the hell away from.)

Volume 1 (easy to reach), pp. 5-15. Let’s rock it.

-- Oh, it’s the beginning of the autobiography – the first page, practically, of the first volume. This is the most read page in the history of the Harvard Classics!
And I’m sure it has a Secretariat-at-Belmont lead over the next-most-read page. “Famous Prefaces,” itself practically a racehorse name, is way up the track.

--- Franklin’s uncle, for whom he was named, taught himself a shorthand. I should teach myself a shorthand. What am I doing reading this? On the other hand, I know how to type, so I’m smarter than Franklin. And I can drive a stick, so I’m smarter than Alexander Pope.

-- Franklin, like my son, was terrible in arithmetic and great in everything else. Now I’ve learned something practical!

-- Franklin also asserts the virtues of eating terrible food (which is, you don’t mind when you are served terrible food) – perhaps he is also the father of WASP cuisine as well as the postal service.

-- He also regrets reading a lot of theology when he was little. Also, attention bloggers: “[A] disputatious turn, by the way, is apt to become a very bad habit, making people often ex

tremely disagreeable in company by the contradiction that is necessary to bring it into practice; and thence, besides souring and spoiling the conversation, is productive of disgusts and, perhaps enmities where you may have occasion for friendship. I had caught it by reading my father’s books of dispute about religion. Persons of good sense, I have since observed, seldom fall into it, except lawyers, university men, and men of all sorts that have been bred at Edinborough."

I think that’s supposed to be a ba-dum-bum right there.

January 1 - Franklin's Autobiography

Okay, here we go – the Harvard dudes have helpfully given us an excerpt about self-improvement itself, Franklin’s plan of resolution from his Autobiography (Vol. 1 pp. 79-85) -- or, as they say, “the rules for success framed by America’s first ‘self-made’ man”.

This is the passage where he decides to list his 13 virtues (Temperance, Silence, Order, Resolution, Frugality, Industry, Sincereity, Justice, Moderation, Cleanliness, Tranqulity, Chastity, Humility), and keeps a chart. We also get Franklin’s schedule where we learn he took two hours a day for lunch. And if Franklin took two hours a day for lunch... (He got up at five, though. )

And, finally, reassuringly, we find that he was disorderly, and could not fix it:

I was almost ready to give up the attempt, and content myself with a faulty character in that respect, like the man who, in buying an ax of a smith, my neighbour, desired to have the whole of its surface as bright as the edge. The smith consented to grind it bright for him if he would turn the wheel; he turn’d, while the smith press’d the broad face of the ax hard and heavily on the stone, which made the turning of it very fatiguing. The man came every now and then from the wheel to see how the work went on, and at length would take his ax as it was, without farther grinding. “No,” said the smith, “turn on, turn on; we shall have it bright by-and-by; as yet, it is only speckled.” “Yes,” said the man, “but I think I like a speckled ax best.” And I believe this may have been the case with many, who, having, for want of some such means as I employ’d, found the difficulty of obtaining good and breaking bad habits in other points of vice and virtue, have given up the struggle, and concluded that “a speckled ax was best”; for something, that pretended to be reason, was every now and then suggesting to me that such extream nicety as I exacted of myself might be a kind of foppery in morals, which, if it were known, would make me ridiculous; that a perfect character might be attended with the inconvenience of being envied and hated; and that a benevolent man should allow a few faults in himself, to keep his friends in countenance.

Emphasis added. One of things that has always made Franklin enjoyable is that he has few illusions.

On the whole, though, he is “a better and happier man than I otherwise should have been if I had not attempted it” -- a good thing to hear with a year-long project stretching out in front of you.

The excerpt doesn’t tell us, but how old was Franklin when he started this program? Looking back it seems to be about 1730, so Franklin was 24. Too late for me? It's hard to say.